RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Rental)
Revenue divided by every night the property was available — the single number that cannot be improved by simply pricing yourself out of the market.
RevPAR = nightly room revenue ÷ nights available (equivalently: ADR × occupancy)
RevPAR is the metric that refuses to be gamed in one direction. Because the denominator is every available night rather than every sold night, an empty calendar drags it down and an over-discounted calendar drags it down. Only the combination of a defensible rate and real occupancy lifts it.
Borrowed from hotels, where PAR meant 'per available room'. In short-term rentals the unit is the whole property, so it is more honestly read as revenue per available rental night.
This is the number to optimise when choosing between two pricing strategies, because it forces the trade-off into a single figure. 'Should I drop $20 to fill this Tuesday?' is a RevPAR question. If the cut fills a night that would otherwise have sat empty, RevPAR rises by the whole discounted rate. If that night would have sold anyway, you simply handed $20 back and RevPAR falls. The decision turns entirely on which of those two was true — which is what pace is for.
RevPAR also travels badly between properties. A studio and a five-bedroom can post identical RevPAR while running completely different businesses, so it compares a property against its own history and against genuinely similar homes, and against almost nothing else. Comparing your RevPAR to a market-wide average is a good way to reach a confident wrong conclusion.
Where it goes wrong
Counting owner-blocked nights as 'available'. Two weeks of personal use in your own house is not lost revenue, but leaving those nights in the denominator makes your RevPAR look worse than the business actually performed — and can push you into discounting that was never needed.
Related terms
- ADR (Average Daily Rate) — The average nightly rate actually paid across the nights you sold — it says nothing about the nights you did not sell.
- Occupancy rate — The share of your available nights that sold — accurate only if 'available' genuinely means bookable.
- Booking pace — How fast a future date is filling compared with how fast it normally fills by the same point — the earliest honest signal that a rate is wrong.